In ball centered sports, such as European football, the goalkeeper customarily wears gloves, in order to capture the ball with greater facility or to divert the ball in a selected direction. The said gloves protect the hands from traumatic injury. Such goalkeeper's gloves characterize themselves, for example, by a surface for the inner hand, which is adapted to act as a shock damper, in order to ameliorate the kinetic energy of an approaching ball and, in general, to provide a retention property by the use of a ball-contacting latex layer, all of which improves the operational characteristics of the said gloves.
Such goalkeeper's gloves should, first, exhibit a sufficient adherence to the outside of the hands, second, in doing this, the gloves should not prove to be too stiff, so that the freedom of movement for the fingers and thumb foes not becomes limited at the moment of ball contact.
This favorable situation may be arrived at, in that the glove can be made of a plurality of flat pieces, which consist of a firm substance and which are stitched together. For example, the glove might consist of a inner hand piece and an outer hand piece, which both adhere to the contour of the wearing hand and approximately have a size to fit said hand. The inner hand part and the outer hand part are stitched together, so that the seam runs along the outer peripheries of both said parts. Too many seams, however, are not held desirable in a goalkeeper's glove.
In a goalkeeper's glove, disclosed by DE 298 18 597 U1 and by a corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,473 A, the part which contacts the inner hand is made in one-piece from latex, and exhibits a palm area, four pre-finger zones and a thumb section which connects onto the said palm area. An inner thumb zone is fully formed from the latex inner hand part. An outer thumb section or upper thumb piece is constructed with a support material of fabric, whereby a portion of the thumb section of the inner hand part is turned back and is finally stitched as an external thumb part onto this support material and the inner thumb construction of the inner hand part is sewn with a peripheral further seam on the support material of the upper thumb section. In the case of this glove, there are in addition, several seams present at the thumbs, which requires an extra amount of production costs and is seen by many goal keepers as obstructive in use.